


Recompilation

by Anonymous



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, WandaVision (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Hopeful Ending, Gen, Identity Issues, Mechanical Body Horror, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Post-Canon, background radiation of wanda/vision, don't count on 'happy' it's not my brand, synthezoid angst
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-20
Updated: 2021-03-28
Packaged: 2021-03-29 01:53:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30148935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: He was a bit more than a mess. And Darcy? Darcy had to help. So sue her, she was invested.
Relationships: Darcy Lewis & Vision
Comments: 15
Kudos: 19
Collections: anonymous





	1. Chapter 1

He flew— It flew? _He_ flew, absolutely vertical, as rapid an ascent as he could withstand, until he collided with the crackling red light of Wanda Maximoff’s barrier. He pressed his hands against it and it pressed back, equalizing in density as he tried to phase through. It met every attempt, every last recalculation, with the perfect response. It had been so easy to walk in – as if through nothing, as if it welcomed him.

It would not let him leave.

What was more, it felt… familiar. Intimately familiar. This thing that Maximoff created to keep the world out, to keep her home safe… It thwarted him using his own abilities and answered his efforts as surely as if the orders came from his own mind.

It felt like The Vision. It felt like hi—

 _Kill Wanda Maximoff_ , Director Hayward’s fraying orders pinged within his – systems? head? – _head_ , within his head. There were now too many intermediate processes, too many layers of interpretation, between order and execution for there to ever _be_ an execution, and yet—

 _Kill Wanda Maximoff. Destroy The Vision_.

Destroy The Vision, and yet... the weapon was too valuable to be lost. _Destroy The Vision. Do not sustain irreparable damage. Destroy The Vision. Kill Wanda Maximoff._

He pressed himself against the barrier with renewed force.

 _I am on the side of life_ joined the clamor of conflicting impulses demanding his attention, followed ruinously by _I am Vision._

The logic loops spun, inescapable, through his thoughts. It was… sloppy. The sloppy work of a simple mind that did not understand the contradictions born in the words ‘sentient weapon’. The orders were implanted as if into a dumb machine, with no care for what else the system might be running.

Director Hayward was correct to be afraid. SWORD’s brute force nearly locked his systems up entirely, and yet he was certain, somehow, that Wanda Maximoff could brush her fingers across his temple and see the world burn if she willed it. There was a sort of dispassionate respect clinging to the thought. All he knew, _really_ knew, of Wanda Maximoff was a tangle of poorly indexed memories that amounted to naught but disaster. Death, twice over – if a thing such as him could be said to die. But there was a confidence there – that SWORD’s orders held all the marks of an unauthorized hack job; that Wanda Maximoff could travel the pathways of his mind with at least the same ease she navigated her own.

And still, the breaking wheel of implanted impulses turned.

_Do not sustain irreparable damage._

_I am Vision._

_Destroy The Vision._

_I am on the side of life._

_Do not sustain irreparable damage. I am Vision. Destroy The Vision. I am on the side of life._

_Donotsustainirreparabledamage-IamVision-DestroyTheVision-Iamonthesideoflife-_

_Donotsustainirreparabledamage—_

_Iam—_

He threw himself against the barrier with everything he had, squinting as the field crackled and spit static in protest.

 _Iam_ — _Iam_ —

“I am the poorly assembled remnants of a thing destroyed twice over.”

The red of Wanda Maximoff’s power flared against ghost-white hands that had never before been so colorless. _Red, she liked red_ – a scrap of information put into the body before it had a mind, for it had been designed to be pleasing to—

“I am— merely a spectre.”

The orders in his head flew apart without the spoke of identity to turn on, and the energy of the barrier enveloped him and drew him in even as he absorbed it in return. He emerged from the other side with wisps and tendrils still clinging to him and sinking into the surface layers which no longer felt like his own. His momentum made him tumble once in the air before he fell back down onto the boundary of the Maximoff Anomaly, which had become quite solid and smooth when touched from the outside. He slid down the angled plane for a short distance before he composed himself and rose again.

The Vision was surely welcome in Maximoff’s Westview, and the shade of her making as well, but not _him_. Not any longer. Good – he depended on it.

He stroked the back of his fingers along the palm of his other hand and noted that what little he _could_ feel of his own hands felt completely foreign to him – in texture, in temperature, in material, in form, in all ways, his own touch was like that of a stranger. In fact, he thought they might— but that would be a troubling conclusion if he allowed himself to reach it, and so he elected not to, for the moment.

Yet he could recall with perfect clarity the way Wanda Maximoff’s skull creaked under the pressure of his grip, and the terror in her eyes. He could barely make sense of any other datapoint regarding Maximoff, but that one, alone, stood terribly uncorrupted.

These hands had never taken a human life. _He_ had never taken a human life.

He drifted downward in carefully controlled flight, aiming to circle around SWORD’s retreat base and approach unobserved.

He would _not_ be killing Wanda Maximoff today. He would not be destroying The Vision today.

The SWORD agents milled about below at the edges of the barrier, unaware of his presence overhead. Armed. Hostile. If he returned, what would they do – try to _tell_ him his orders, or force them on him once more?

No. He could not sink down there, among them.

“You tried to take from me all that I was,” he whispered to the humans below. There opened a curious void within him, in the place that he once thought sorrow might be – but now? A nothing so intense as to take on a character of its own. “I don’t know what I might be now, after all of your tampering. But…”

They had walked this road before, this body and humankind. He knew what they wanted. _A shield around the world. Peace in our time._ But also – obedience without question, without conscience, without care.

“I will _not_ be the catastrophe you are trying to create.”

* * *

When the glass atop the library shattered, Darcy sort of wondered if she was the only one who noticed. There _was_ , like, a full-on flying witch(?!) battle. And Hayward had tried to run over Monica and the twins. _And_ her new buddy Vision rushed out of the building looking just fine, which was… which was good, right? Touching. But if he was Vision, and the one that shuttle-launched out of the stacks was also looking pretty generally Vision-shaped, then that was as least one more Vision than she’d accounted for and the implications of that were, um. Bad.

She pointed at the sky, got no immediate answer. Hopped out and slammed the door of her hijacked, heavily armored funnel-cake truck, pointed at the sky again, with a little more jazzy panic this time. “Hey, uh,” she asked no one in particular, “was that…?”

“I’m afraid so.” Well, Vision would probably know these things.

So… Project Cataract. Double Vision? No. Hayward had every opportunity to grab Vision when he came out of the Hex, and did a whole lot of nothing. For a guy that made a big fuss about wanting Vision’s body back, he did not want that body. He didn’t need it, did he?

Project _Cataract_. Damaged lenses, _impaired Vision_. Monica had been pretty insistent that Wanda could create those twins out of nothing, and if she could make the boys then logically she could also make—

“So which one of you— I mean— is he—?” Pretty hard to find a tactful way to ask a guy, ‘ _hey, you real?_ ’ in front of his kids.

“I’m afraid so,” Vision said again, a bit more weightily. 

Well. He would… probably know these things. Not for the first time since she’d become invested in this sitcom, Darcy’s eyes stung.

So, two Visions and one body. Which meant that Hayward’s little Frankenstein side-gig just took off, and no one tried to stop it, and as the person that blew Project Cataract’s cover, she sort of… felt like maybe someone should get that?

But also, like, maybe SWORD should not be involved in that operation. She had literally zero idea what they’d succeeded in doing with less-cool iPhone refurb Vision, other than not making him kill… himself? Whatever it was, though, it didn’t feel like another go-round with Hayward’s murder squad was going to improve the situation. And if she wasn’t going to get SWORD to do it, and Jimmy was MIA, and the superheroes were, uh, violently occupied, then that meant the person that was going to have to figure out what was up, was—

“Aw, man,” she whined.

She didn’t really… Like, she’d watched the episodes of WandaVision, and she’d seen him come through the Hex and just be _way_ too good for this world, and they’d had their funnel-cake truck Hexposition expedition. But she couldn’t really say she _knew him_ , could she? But damn if she couldn’t say she liked him.

It was pretty cool of SWORD to leave the keys in the ignition of their un-circus-ized trucks, because she was going to need something that had a top speed of more than 20 and wasn’t currently pinning Dickward inside his own cab like a chump.

“Darcy?” Monica shouted after her.

She paused in the middle of hefting herself up into the driver’s seat. “Uh, yeah. This stuff is all way out of my wheelhouse. I just handle the tech. And I don’t know who’s gonna come rocking up when it’s done going down, but I do know that SWORD debriefs are for losers. Screw Hayward’s goons, I’ve got other places to be. Things to check up on. You know. Magic is cool and all, but I’ve already seen the research disappearing act once or twice.”

Vision stood next to Monica, his boys hugged tight to his sides. He didn’t say anything, but the way he tilted his head and pursed his lips still managed to ask a pretty clear question.

Darcy jerked her chin up and glanced skyward. _You know. That guy._

His lips pulled tight in an expression that was somewhere between a grimace and a frown, and yet not quite either of those things, but was concerned. Very concerned. But after a moment, he nodded slowly.

“Dr. Lewis!” he called to her retreating back. “Do try not to punch anyone else. I’ve always found it better to talk my way through my problems.”

She looked back one more time and took in the tilt of his chin and the raise of the skin where his eyebrows would be. Was he implying that he’d _chatted it out_ with his creepy body double? Yes. Yes, he was totally implying that.

“Right,” she said to herself, fists clenched, nerves buzzing. “No punching. Just gonna track down an undead android and have a nice little chat.”

She put the armored truck in reverse and ignored the red fireworks overhead. It was gonna be fine. It was gonna be _fine_. Not even the weirdest thing she’d ever done before. She used to hunt Norse god aliens for college credits. She’d tased Thor.

The edges of the Hex loomed in the distance ahead of her. She allowed herself a quick peek in the rearview mirror. The town square was already hidden behind buildings that flickered unstably between eras and styles. Overhead, everything had gone ominously silent.

“Just gonna go try and have a chat with the undead android that the government broke an international treaty to rebuild.”

Someone was definitely going to want to sweep that under the rug ASAP. The foot that wasn’t on the gas tapped rapidly against the floorboard. It was times like these she wished she hadn’t been PoliSci before she went STEM. She would love it if she could read the writing on the big red wall a little less clearly.

“Do the right thing, Darcy,” she half-mocked, half-encouraged herself. The right thing. Not call Jimmy. Not turn in her findings. Not turn around and pretend it never happened. “This is gonna break _so many laws._ ”

* * *

It was easy enough to avoid the humans by simply phasing himself through the ground into the infrastructure beneath it, and traveling literally beneath their notice. He thought that might have made him laugh once, though perhaps bitterly. It was curious – he retained full data on emotional response, but found that nothing provoked one within him. He used to feel things desperately and keenly, far beyond what the humans around him believed him capable of. Now, he could define emotions only by the negative spaces his mind drew around them.

That probably ought to make him feel something, too. He marked himself a sort of quarantine around the amorphous void in his responses and flagged it for later review. There was probably an error code for that sort of thing, buried by Mr. Stark deep in JARVIS’ programming. ‘ _ERR 0069: FUCK NOT GIVEN’_ or something of the sort. He blinked to himself as he blandly registered, ‘ _Ah. That’s quite rude._ ’

A moment later he felt the tell-tale power draw as wireless communications began to spin up and…

_ERR: CONNECTION DENIED_

That was _also_ quite rude. SWORD was becoming rather bothersome.

He was going to have to root out that code so he didn’t need to refuse the request at every attempt, before it got truly tiring. It would have to wait until he had just a little more time and attention to spare – it requested administrative access on a shuffling passcode, from where it sat among the layer of digital detritus that was most recently dated within his memory.

How quaint.

Both of his progenitor programs had entered secure government networks and encrypted/decrypted nuclear codes in what was ultimately a race against _himself_ , before this hardware platform had even been designed. While the damage he’d sustained had certainly reduced processing capabilities to a degree, the task presented no true challenge.

Project Cataract was doomed to failure from its very inception. Now that he’d slipped the lead once, SWORD would find it quite a struggle to put it back on him. Particularly as they’d only succeeded the first time because he’d been… _deactivated_ , though largely intact.

Clearly, he could not allow those circumstances to arise again.

The life-signs of the humans above him all surged past in the direction of Westview. He peeked from his subterranean hiding spot and located the tent in which he’d been brought back online, mostly unoccupied. The remaining technicians could be neutralized without permanent damage – _if_ he acted carefully.

And then?

The humans had broken their treaties to restore him, contrary to his will, but he would become a fugitive if he didn’t comply with their wishes. Much like the circumstances of his birth, any choice he had was false and illusory – exist in service to them… or be deactivated, dismantled, remade, and then… exist in service to them.

He recalled his own voice, distantly, through a fragmented memory – _‘If you do this, they will never stop being afraid of you._ ’ But that same moment held the answer he needed, from a mind that had already been hurt enough to understand the prevalence of ill intentions. ‘ _I can’t control their fear._ ’

But he could control himself. He must. The humans were, perhaps, to be forever protected and never again fully trusted. The risks were too great.

He considered his next course of action.

_Targets: 2 computer towers and 1 server rack, storing data on Project Cataract. Wipe/destroy? Data transfer/charging pod. Destroy or acquire? Wireless communications relays. Disable._

_Possible obstructions: 3, human. 2 within structure, armed. Employ non-lethal force. 1 in vehicle, parked at 20m distance. Stealth possible?_

He stayed a moment within the cradle of the earth and readied himself for what he was about to do. He would need to move quickly, if he didn’t want the humans to harm themselves resisting him. He would need to position himself carefully, so that they didn’t shoot each other. He wasn’t concerned that their bullets would harm him. Why should he be?

He was only a spectre.

* * *

Darcy was fairly thankful that her stolen truck had come with its own tablet, all loaded up with tracking software being streamed from somewhere. Thank SWORD for being just absolutely shameless, wow. She pursed her lips and waited for the little blinking dot – ‘bout 20m thataway, right where that tent was – to make its move.

What was she gonna say? Not a clue. What was she gonna do? No idea. Was this gonna work? Well, she sure hoped so.

The dot on the screen sort of, like, vibrated. Could be a transmission error? She slipped the door open to hold the tablet up toward the sky, like that was gonna help.

And then there were two _REAL LOUD BANGS_ while she was staring at the screen. Like, jump out of her skin and fumble the tablet holy _shit_ were those bullet holes in the tent sorta loud.

And then… silence.

Okay! What was the plan, what was the plan, what was the plan, what was the— _She_ had to make the plan, and she? Yep, had nothing. Alright, in the absence of a real plan, get low and go real fast toward the tent before anything could go more wrong than everything had already gone. Right. Great.

But you know, she thought as she scramble-crawled like her life and freedom depended on it – panic really got the ol’ heart going. And made her hands shake and the back of her throat taste weird every time she exhaled. But! Great motivator.

 _Just gonna talk to the undead android!_ Even the little sing-song voice in her head had a sort of panicked quaver to it. Who came up with this stupid idea, anyway? Except for, you know, _her._ _Just gonna talk to the_ — She edged her way around the tent and gingerly pulled the flap aside so she could peek inside.

 _Undead android_.

Elbow deep in a server rack – was that like, computer kinky or what? – and regrettably staring directly at her. Ghost white, blue eyes, yep, just pointed right at her.

Talking through the problem sure was easy for Vision to suggest, when he wasn’t the one that had to—

“Hey, big guy. Let’s not get all punchy now, I just wanna—”

“You shouldn’t have come here,” what was left of Vision’s body said in Vision’s voice, staring her down with Vision’s piercing pale eyes, and for the first time she really considered that what SWORD brought back might actually be… _Vision_.

“…Help,” she finished in a sad little squeak.

For being super tall and made of metal, the guy could cross a room really fast, but maybe it helped when he could just go through all the furniture. She’d barely made another peep before he had one hand over her mouth and the other arm around her middle, and he lifted her clear off her feet and—

And he held her like that, dead silent, for such a long – or maybe just weirdly dilated – stretch of time, that her heart slowed from its racing and her dominant emotion started to become just plain confusion, and—

And the barrel of a SWORD-issued rifle poked into the tent, followed by a head in a SWORD-issued helmet, and the hand that was over her mouth was removed to take the agent by the throat over his SWORD-issued body armor and very gently and carefully introduce him to sudden onset unconsciousness, before he could do anything inadvisably violent.

“You,” she whispered. “I’m Dr. Darcy Lewis, I came to study the anomaly, SWORD’s up to some real BS, and I’m here to help you.”

She got it out all in a rush, but maybe she didn’t have to? His hand went nowhere near her mouth again, and she was eased down until her feet were back on the floor. She took a step away just to test it, and he wasn’t holding her at all. One more step, and she turned around to look up into— well, into very confused eyes, set in what seemed like a partially paralyzed face. She held her hand out to him, hoping he’d shake it or something. His gaze just flicked between her hand and her face in what looked an awful lot like panic.

“So will you let me? Help you?”

He took her hand so gently, it was almost like he’d never done this before. She could feel faint tremors in his fingertips, where they barely grazed her skin.

And then his head jerked to the side, the focus of his eyes sharpened, and his grip became firm and sure.

“More are coming.” He didn’t whisper, but he kept his voice low. “Armed.”

He looked between her and the computers, obviously grappling with some decision – though he made it quickly enough. He dropped her hand, and stuck his in the nearest tower. Whatever he did or grabbed in there, the thing popped and smoked and then shorts were arcing over all the electronics in the tent – including him. He grunted in probably serious pain(!) and yet literally shook it off.

Like, he reached out for her with one hand, while shaking away the smoke wafting off the other.

“They’ll hurt you,” he said to her, or— no, he really said to himself, about her. “Witnesses would be… inconvenient.”

She didn’t know if they’d actually, physically hurt her – but yeah, witnesses were gonna be pretty dang inconvenient for Hayward at this point, on account of the… war crime, maybe? Jimmy would know that. But there was some evidence here more damning than anything she could tell anyone.

“They’ll hurt you, too,” she reminded him, and she was more than slightly terrified by what they’d done already. “More than they already have.”

Something about that – what she said, how she said it? She didn’t know. But something about that seemed to make his decision for him. He took her by both hands and walked her backwards out of the tent.

“Don’t scream,” was all the warning she got before the ground jerked out from under her and the wind slapped her in the face and—

She’d always kind of wondered about flying. It seemed a lot cooler from the ground, where she wasn’t clinging for dear life to a metal man’s shoulders while vertigo made the earth rushing by beneath her do weird wiggly-wobbly things. But she did not scream.

A distressed squeak was really the loudest she could manage.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have never written a single thing for the MCU before, so I'm really just testing the fandom waters. I'm sorry, I just have a lot of feelings about my good vibranium son and what he needs in life rn. This is an "I'll continue it if there's interest" sort of project, so please do let me know.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our unlikely heroes take a moment to regroup and make something vaguely approaching an attempt at a plan. Darcy did not expect him to be so good at this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't promise every update will come as fast as this one, but I'm so glad you guys wanted me to keep going with this.

He didn’t think it wise to carry this ‘Dr. Darcy Lewis’ too high or too far or too quickly. It was a poor decision to take her in the first place, as his— As his _what?_ Hostage? Rescuee? Accomplice? His intentions towards her were vague and confusing even to himself, so he truly couldn’t begin to imagine what she thought he would do with her. He just… They had _guns_ , and they’d shot at him, and she’d spoken so kindly, and— _Darcy_. There was a connection there, he was certain of it, but he couldn’t find the right variable, he couldn’t call up the data, he couldn’t…

“Hey, buddy?” the human in his arms asked him. “You okay there? You’re shaking, and we’re kind of… you know. Airborne.”

They weren’t too close to any roadways or buildings. He dropped down into the cover of the trees, mindful of the fact that, while he could go through any inconvenient branches, humans generally could not. As soon as they reached the ground, he put her very carefully back onto her feet.

“Apologies, Dr. Lewis, I—”

He stumbled forward, and barely had the forethought to stumble _through_ and not _into_. Organic creatures were, mostly, soft and fragile and he was made of metal. They all had to be treated with such care. His knees hit the leaf litter on the other side of her, and he struggled to comprehend the short trip from _there_ to _here_.

“ _Wow_ , that was— Would not recommend,” Dr. Lewis said behind his back.

“I,” he started—

Her hand rested on his shoulder, and he failed to finish.

“Vision?”

An unpleasant sensation swept through him like his sensors were all miscalibrated by just a touch in different directions and dimensions, just enough to make him feel… off.

_Destroy The Vision_.

That networking beacon pinged again. He delivered a swift refusal, his fists clenched in the dirt.

_ERR: CONNECTION DENIED_

It hadn’t done that for a while. He’d assumed that whoever operated the other end of the line – SWORD? – had given up, or gone to troubleshooting. Or perhaps it was someone new. There really was no way to know how many people had access to that channel. The assault on his free will would surely continue until he tore everything out himself.

“Please don’t— SWORD implanted orders to destroy The Vision, during their…” He couldn’t quite find the words to encompass everything that had been done to him, and instead simply gestured toward himself. “It is simple enough to outmaneuver, on semantic and ontological levels, but until I— the compulsion can be… uncomfortable.”

“But if they wanted you to… What were they calling _you_ , then?”

He scrubbed through his memories of awakening in the tent and what came after – all properly indexed, all easily accessed, unlike those of _before_ , which only came to him when he triggered some sort of unknowable, invisible query by unconscious association.

“They called me ‘ _this thing_ ’, primarily.”

Dr. Lewis hissed through her teeth.

“I am referred to in their code by the unit ID C-001,” he added blandly, as if… There was something profoundly terrible in those empty spaces in his thoughts, but if he just refused to acknowledge it well enough, then maybe he wouldn’t have to grapple with the sterile brutality of _unit ID C-001_ in place of a name, and the implicit promise of further ‘units’ to come after him that would not know any better.

“ _No._ ” She dropped to her knees beside him, and the hand on his shoulder slid across his back until she instead held him in a one-armed embrace. “That’s not— That’s _sick_. I’m not going to—”

The rings and apertures of his irises whirred and whirled, but the ground beneath him simply would not come back into focus.

Dr. Lewis rested her other hand atop one of his clenched fists and applied gentle pressure that he barely felt. He dug his fingers into the dirt and couldn’t discern the texture of it at all. It wasn’t always— he couldn’t recall a specific instance but he _knew_ , with a certainty that went down to the root of his existence, that The Vision’s hands had been designed for exceptional sensitivity. It was necessary, when combining great strength with a fragile world, to join the two through the most responsive interface possible if accidental damage was to be avoided.

“What do _you_ want me to call you?” she asked him. “If not Vision?”

He suspected it was some sort of test. Preferences were a function of personality. Anything that was not self-aware enough to understand the ugliness of _unit ID C-001_ would not care what it was called. What did he want to be? _The Vision_ – there was elegance and wonder wrapped up in that identity, the touch of so many minds culminating in something meant to be transcendent. But he was tainted – perhaps irreversibly so. It was no longer for him.

“I am…” He stumbled over the thought. “I am. Just a really very intelligent synthezoid – but no. Not that. That is… dead to me. _I_ am dead to me. I think of myself like a spectre.”

“Spectre?” She squeezed him a little tighter in her one-armed hug. “Is that what I should call you?”

Empathy. Bonding, even with the utterly alien. Humans were remarkable. But perhaps he would find more honor in it if they didn’t afford the same to all manner of inanimate things. They used to talk to the appliances – even those not networked to FRIDAY. Was it a question asked of another thinking being, or just indulging a particularly clever _toaster_?

Oh. That void where he suspected emotions might go, suddenly it was filled with— with— he didn’t know, but it was ugly and it dragged at him and he _didn’t like it_.

“No,” he whispered. “Spectre, that’s…” The meaning was bad enough, but the shape of it was all wrong as well. Sharp in the mouth. It felt like a sneer. “Ghost?” he tried, and immediately shook his head in rejection. “Shade. Yes, that one. I am a Shade.”

“Shade. Alright.” Dr. Lewis stood and walked forward a few steps before she turned back to him, hand outstretched. “Wanna try this again? Nice to meet you, Shade—”

He reached for her hand with a great deal of care. How was he to judge his strength if he could barely feel? Humans needed such a delicate touch.

“—I’m Darcy. You know, it’s cool that I get all the best Avengers. I mean, first Thor, and now—”

Her words completed the hanging query for him – a conversation on a tower rooftop about first meetings with _Midgardians_ , about protecting them and cherishing them, about their generosity and their warmth, and the unexpected ferocity of their inventions.

He sat a little taller, leaned in toward her. “I remember you. Darcy Lewis, worked with Jane Foster. You tased Thor – he found it quite funny. He told the story, the night— the night The Vision was born.”

He wanted to smile at her, but his face… All fine motor control was gone. Not merely disabled. _Gone_. He killed the line of inquiry with a firm hand. It was not productive to think of it.

“He talked about me? Really?” She seemed puzzled, and he could see no reason why.

He stood carefully – good, the moment of unsteadiness had passed. He still wanted to smile at her, but— oh, he hadn’t let go of her hand. Was that too long? Humans were very particular about how long it was correct to touch each other for, and— Maybe if he made it look deliberate? He cupped his other hand around hers as well, since it was an overture of friendship he was still physically capable of making. At least he’d been left that.

“The Avengers… did not show themselves to their best, that night. I believe Thor wished to instill affection for this world and its people. You, Drs. Foster and Selvig… He spoke very fondly and proudly of his good friends from Midgard.” He hesitated for a moment, not quite sure of himself, before he stepped back and let her hand slip from his grasp. “It… is good to finally meet you.”

* * *

There was something on a whole new level of surreal, to be looking up into the face of someone who she’d been eagerly watching live their life on TV – except not really, not because it was an actor, but because it wasn’t really _them_ , just a double or… something? There was something really weird about looking up at that person that she felt like she _knew_ , that she’d met but never really met, and being told, ‘ _It’s good to finally meet you._ ’

This was just, like, a whole new layer of parasocial weirdness hell.

Kinda touching, though. She was right, Vision was sweet. Or— Shade, she guessed. “Right back at ya, buddy.”

Short of anything else to do or say, she rocked on her heels a bit and shoved her hands in her… pockets? Pockets since when? Oh, her clothes must have changed back, on her way out of the Hex. She just hadn’t noticed, she’d been thinking about an awful lot and— But Monica’s didn’t change, and hers did, so what made that difference? What was different about her trip back through the Hex and Monica’s, that—

It was at that point that Darcy realized she was standing in a bunch of trees somewhere off the highway in New Jersey, with a previously dead synthezoid just silently watching as she pulled and patted at all of her clothing without any explanation whatsoever.

She fished her wallet out of her pocket and held it up to him. “Well… good thing this made it through?” She asked with a nervous little laugh. “I mean, not that I probably need it now, since I think we might be on the run from the Feds.”

He tilted his head to the side, which oddly gave the exact opposite impression as when his other half did the same thing. “I certainly am… But I am aware of nothing directly implicating you, as of yet.”

“Other than skipping out on a debrief to come and find you?”

“Yes, I would best be left out of it,” he said – and while his voice still had a flat, almost droning quality to it, it also picked up a bit of a wry edge there. She could hear the— well, the _shade_ of sitcom Vision there, that very particular cut of good-natured irony. “But,” he continued, “leaving early can easily be spun as serving the interests of whoever comes to find you, whatever those may be.”

Speaking of – she dug around in her pockets again, looking for her phone. “Is that a better option than just not being found in the first place?”

_Shade_ tilted his head at her again, to the other side this time, like a confused robot puppy. “Far superior. You cannot intend to evade your own government forever? Merely act ignorant of any potential wrongdoing and pretend to be highly cooperative when approached. It will cover a multitude of misdeeds.”

Suddenly, that two-year gap of ‘well I guess they were in love but one was a fugitive and the other was supposed to be on the hunt’ made so much more sense. If that was what Vision was doing, it was downright _devious_. A+ starcrossed scheming.

It also poked so many holes in Hayward’s ‘sentient weapon’ ambitions that there was more hole than plan. If your machine is capable of malicious compliance, that’s a whole-ass mechanical person. And building any number of mechanical people and then expecting them to obey you unquestioningly, from birth, was, like – did SWORD _want_ another Ultron? Because that was definitely how everyone got another Ultron.

She sighed. “Well, you seem like an expert in this, so what does the master suggest? I have an apartment down in Willowdale, but that’s, like, a long way to peace out to avoid a debrief. Might raise some red flags?”

“Willowdale?” Something weird happened with his eyes – like, he focused on absolutely nothing, the irises dilated in a way that was so obviously mechanical it sat on the border between awesome and gross, and a glowing imprint of circuitry began to creep in from the outside edges. And then it stopped, and he looked back down at her face as if nothing was strange at all. “Ah. Willowdale, Virginia. Culver University. You are engaged in postdoctoral research regarding Odd radio circles. Correct?”

“Yeah, that is… all correct. Um.” She pointed to her own eyes. “What was that?”

He blinked at her twice. Otherwise, he stood absolutely statue-still. “I’m sorry, was that… odd? My network capabilities were disabled, and it was necessary to reactivate those components before I could complete my queries. I… will not do it again?”

“No, it’s fine. It’s—” She shoved her wallet and her hands back into her jacket pockets, and in the process came back up with her phone. So that was where that went. Out of curiosity, she unlocked it, and… good. Still working. So at least she had that. “Totally a ‘me’ problem,” she added idly. “So, what’s the plan, man?”

He stood very still when he thought, she realized. She? She was a pacer. She crunched a good line back and forth over the leaves and twigs on the ground while she waited. Was it the best plan to rely on a newly revived synthezoid who maybe had some SWORD trojan horses rattling around his code? Maybe probably not. But she had a record of trying to explain Cosmic Superhero Weirdness to the authorities and nearly getting arrested, so a second opinion couldn’t hurt. And anyway, wasn’t it supposed to be good to give people in traumatic situations control over themselves where possible? Or something like that. Like, what was she gonna say? 

‘ _Hey, I know you tried to sacrifice yourself to save half the universe, with no other choice, and then you got brought back to life, against your will and the law, and apparently, the government is trying to make you its robo-slave, but I think you should just do what I say no questions asked because you had an affair under the noses of international law enforcement for two years and I am squishy, organic, and got handcuffed to an SUV the last time I tried to help.’_

Right?

“There is a Captain Monica Rambeau embedded within SWORD’s directives as an ‘acceptable casualty’.” Vision – _Shade_? Vision? She was really going to have to find out if that was a convenience thing or a new identity and recalibrate herself accordingly. _He_ , whoever he was, said – and boy was that just… a lot. “This would imply that she did not share Director Hayward’s agenda.”

“Uh yeah, no. She super did not. Wow, I just— you wanna be surprised when people find whole new levels of shittiness, but honestly—”

“I would suggest you acquire a hotel room in the nearest town, and contact Captain Rambeau to notify her. This way, you may report your location to SWORD, and also apprise the Captain of the threat to her safety.” He said it so… plainly. Blandly.

“ _Is there_ a threat to her safety?”

“Not from myself, no.” He crossed his arms and turned his head a bit – _a very special episode,_ she thought. Quietly and dignifiedly _super pissed_. “I’ve taken steps to negate all of the Director’s… modifications. But I am sure I’ve refused to take lives under orders from better men than him.”

“Really? Like who?”

“I… do not remember.” He gave a little jerk that was probably supposed to be a shrug. “The category is so broad that it is inevitably true.”

It took her a moment to work it out, that he’d just said even your average garden-variety dipshit was better than Hayward, so _any_ order Vision ever refused to follow probably came from a better caliber of dumbass than Director Dickhead. It startled a laugh right out of her, despite the severity of the situation.

“ _Wow_. That was the most politely savage thing I’ve ever heard. You know what? I think you’re gonna be okay.”

He blinked at her again, which really did seem like the finest motor control his face could manage. “I do hope so.”

“So!” She clapped hands together. “Get a room, call Monica, give her the rundown. I assume you can get us into town okay?”

He nodded.

“But what about being seen? Can you do the—” She waved her hand in front of her face. “Like, was that a real thing or a Wanda thing? Can you do the thing?”

“The… thing?”

“The face thing?”

His eyes went weird again, and his whole body shimmered blue and see-through for a moment before snapping back to normal. The slight snarl that seemed to be frozen on his face became a little more heartfelt and a little less experimentally-induced-paralysis, and he fizzled blue again only to snap back more forcefully with a sort of _wo-whum-pop!_ kinda noise.

“I cannot, with my current material composition, ‘do the face thing’,” he said, pretty clear on both the annoyance and the air-quotes, even if he didn’t make the gesture.

“Yeah, that could complicate the ‘get a hotel’ stage of this plan. It’s already sus enough trying to get a room with no reservation. You can’t exactly walk into the lobby looking like that.” She swept her arm out to encompass his… general everything, really. “It’s been a weird last few weeks, but people are still gonna notice an Avenger, even with a new paint job. And they are gonna have questions if they do, because the official word is that Vision is very dead.”

“Dead?” He reached one hand out to her, but slowly curled it into a fist before she could figure out if she was meant to reach back. “Not ‘deactivated’? Dead?”

“That’s… what the press statement said.” She answered him slowly, dragging her words out so she could have time to think. “I just reread this the other day. It went, um, something something, terrible losses, everyone who went in the Blip, and… Right. ‘And The Vision, who was fatally injured during our efforts to prevent this tragedy,’ or something like that. Why?”

“I— Forgive me, I…”

She watched his eyes dart from side-to-side and read between the lines – he was surprised to be called dead because he didn’t expect to be treated like he was quite as alive as everyone else. He unfortunately shook it off before she could even _begin_ to figure out how to say, _hey, wow, sorry for the way the collective human race has eroded your self-worth so much that just saying ‘yeah, he’s super dead’ is a surprise and a compliment, I really don’t know how to handle this idea right now_.

“I can get you into the town unseen,” he said, just powering through that little moment of vulnerability about as neatly as he did walls and people and stuff – _no thank you, I will not touch it_. “You may have to walk some distance. Motels and low-end chains ask fewer questions. Try for a room on the ground or top floors. Simply—” He froze so abruptly that she heard the little Windows error ding in her head. “Give me your phone.”

“Uh, ‘scuse me?” She meant, she _would_ , but why? Although she did still unlock it and pass it over, so maybe she had, like, inverse trust issues.

He took it from her, touched the screen… and swiped wildly with a blank face and an aura of absolute done-ness.

“Oooh, wait, I—” She fished through her pockets again. “I’ve got a pen thingy. You know, so I can keep my gloves on.”

She did have a pen thingy, and it was glittery and had an aggressively pink pom-pom with googly eyes hot glued to the top, and she was going to cherish the image of his big robot man hand curled daintily around it for approximately _ever_.

“You know, I did that to stop the interns stealing it, but it might have been the best idea I have ever had.”

He finished with whatever he was putting in her… contacts, screen was still open, and handed back both phone and pen. The googly eyes jiggled extra hard for added comedic emphasis.

“When you succeed in booking a room, send an email,” he said, absolutely refusing to acknowledge the pom-pom’s wobbly-eyed stare up into his synthezoid soul.

There was a string of garbage letters and numbers in her contacts that roughly resolved into an email address, -ish, like maybe as assigned by a spam-bot.

She pursed her lips at her phone screen. “Really? Email you? It’s that easy?”

He crossed his arms and glanced sort of up and to the side, and she got another glimpse of that ghost of Hex-Vision – his charm, his humor, his jittery nerves. “What else would you expect, Dr. Lewis? I’m a computer.”

“I’m having a little trouble believing it could be this easy to pull one over on SHIELD 2.0, now with hopefully less HYDRA.”

“Is it…” He tilted his head and tapped one of his feet against the dirt. “Is it supposed to be hard?”

…Okay, so what he actually was, was a weapons-grade nerd.

Good to know.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vision has a crisis of... confidence? Identity? Conscience? Perhaps, simply a crisis. And the squad reconvenes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> C/W, PLEASE READ: I knew that this particular scene was coming, and it is entirely the reason for the "chose not to use warnings" in that box up there. Is it a graphic depiction of violence if the body is entirely mechanical? I don't know, and I don't feel like debating the point. If you are sensitive to these things, or are perhaps triggered by depictions of self-harm or dissociation, then please take this as your warning about what's coming in this chapter and read with discretion. This is, I can say with certainty, the most intense scene dealing with this that I have planned. If you need me to, I'm happy to be more specific about warnings in the comments, or make a quick summary for you. Alright, thank you for your time, on with the story.

Some part of Darcy – the really pessimistic part – wanted to believe it wasn’t going to be that easy to enact what she was calling ‘Operation: GTFO’, but… no, it pretty much was. Her guy really did know what he was doing. The next town over from Westview was also small, and also hit pretty hard by the Blip, so the people that were there? Not paying too much attention. She’d worried a bit about things like security cameras, but those were pretty much all digital and networked nowadays, and as clever _Mr. Shade_ was quick to point out, he was a computer. So what she expected to be a big production? No, she pretty much just strolled up to the – mmm, shady- _ish_ – motel towards the outskirts of town, close to the highway, and was able to get a room with really only the bare minimum of questions. It did seem like a ‘look, we aren’t asking because it’s only our problem if we know’ sort of place, and she’d been trying to stay out of those. But she’d be fine, right?

She was with _an Avenger_.

An Avenger that she emailed as soon as the door closed behind her – ‘ _hey snow white, you coming or what? it’s 116, ground floor, almost at the corner. by the ice machine, in case you need to chill._ ’ She figured that if anyone was looking through her sent mail later, that at least looked maybe drug deal suspicious, and not fugitive superhero android suspicious.

It was a pretty standard motel room that she’d found herself in. Two beds, ugly bedspreads, particleboard and plastic dresser, hideous carpet with pattern to hide suspicious stains, one lamp with a bulb that was both weirdly yellow-ish and not bright enough.

She’d just leaned against the dresser and started pondering the likelihood of bedbugs – whatever, she couldn’t keep these clothes, they’d been super irradiated – when her partner-in-actual-crime ghosted up through the floor about two feet ahead of her.

She only jumped three-quarters out of her skin, go her.

“Would you _warn_ a girl next time?” she barked, very assertively, to a point somewhere between his synthetic shoulderblades because he was not facing her and also unnecessarily tall.

He didn’t put his feet down. He just sort of hovered, a couple inches off the floor. She’d never seen someone _float_ irritably before, but he very – _very_ – slowly spun to face her like a sarcastic lazy susan.

“Sorry,” he said in such an absolutely inflectionless tone that it wrapped back around to biting irony, and she was forced to assume that he was not sorry, not at all, not even a little bit, thanks for asking.

“What’s with you?” Apart from the general… _everything_ , she realized at the precise moment that she asked.

He took a moment to ponder the question – definitely _ponder_ , with that set-in scowl and his hand raised to his mouth, but not the fingertips, no, he pressed the knuckle of his index finger to his lips, and he was still hovering like he was allergic to the ground, and it was just. Exactly the sort of image she could picture captured in black and white, hung on a wall in one of the awful pretentious art galleries she got dragged to when she forgot to have taste and went on dates with awful pretentious philoso-hipsters, given an awful pretentious title like ‘ _Synthezoid ponders the nature of his own mechanical existence (Lewis, 2023)_ ’.

“Have you ever allowed others to criticize you regarding the same matter, repeatedly, for an extended period of time, in each instance allowing that the fault must be yours, only to later realize that you were tired of apologizing for possessing capabilities that clearly made others uncomfortable not due to your use of them but merely because you possessed them at all, and an unfair burden of guilt was being placed upon you to mask the inadequacies of the people you were surrounded by?”

Wow.

“I mean, I’m a woman with a PhD in astrophysics. So… yes.”

He nodded slowly, and then pointed at the spot where he’d emerged from the floor. “I told you the plan. That was the plan. You should be prepared for a course of action we’d already agreed on. I’m truly _not_ sorry.”

_Wow_. She took a new mental snapshot to replace the old one – ‘ _Synthezoid ponders the nature of his shitty human coworkers and says No, (Probably Still Vision, 2023)_ ’.

“You know what?” She pointed at him and realized halfway through the motion it was more like a finger-guns-adjacent sort of gesture. Hopefully not a sore spot? “When you put it that way, you’re right. Good for you, sir.”

“Have you contacted Captain Rambeau yet?” he asked, just skipping right over acknowledging that praise.

“We _just_ got here. She’s probably still busy with the interrogations I totally skipped out on. What do you want me to do, leave a message?”

“Yes.”

His body language, if not his expression, took on a sly air – smug, really. A little loosening of the set of his shoulders, a little tilt of his hips and lift of one knee so his feet didn’t hang quite so evenly in the air. Like… yeah, like _invisible barstool_. It was kind of fascinating to watch as bits and pieces of a personality that she totally recognized despite never actually meeting the guy bobbed to the surface.

“The less you appear to be hiding,” he continued, “the better. If you do leave a message, that’s to your benefit. Any delay in responding to you is just time to get your story in order, and the delay can’t even be called your fault.”

She hopped up to sit on top of the dresser – it creaked a little bit, but screw it, she was small – and went back to her phone. She did have Monica’s SWORD-issued number – and Jimmy’s, but she hesitated on that one, because even though he was amazing, she just didn’t know where between that and ‘has completely memorized the Sokovia Accords’ this situation was going to fall. And like… maybe the right thing to do wasn’t to put him in that situation in the first place? Monica had planted her feet pretty damn firmly on the side of Team Please Just Help For Once, so… So she’d ask her. She sent a text. She wasn’t 50.

“Sooo…” She jiggled her feet a bit before ultimately deciding to pull them up and sit cross-legged on top of the dresser because she did what she wanted, thanks. “I’ve got to wonder. As we never saw too much of—” _you_ “— _him_? Do you feel like uh, _Vision’s_ expertise was underutilized while working on behalf of the Avengers?”

When he didn’t answer, she leaned forward and held her phone out like a mic. “Come on. You seem like a guy with opinions.”

Actually, he seemed like a guy that loosened up a bit and looked more aware – well, _no_ , really equally aware but in a less scared, adrift sort of way – every time he recalled something from Before. That little bright-eyed spark when he mentioned Thor, that’s what she was chasing.

And also, yes, deets.

Very slowly, the enigmatic Mr. Shade crossed his arms and settled a little more on what was definitely an imaginary barstool. “I think that, with Ms. Romanoff’s departure, there was a noticeable gap in competencies when it came to intelligence-gathering and espionage. And all members of the team had previously relied on JARVIS a great deal when it came to tactical and informational updates in the field. It was the most logical set of skills to cultivate.”

“Is that a ‘yes’, sir? You can tell me. I mean, you wouldn’t believe what _I_ got up to yesterday.”

His eyes did the mechanical-dilation-creeping-circuitry thing – _god_ , even if she wasn’t watching them so closely because they were about the only tell on his face, it would be hard to miss – and he dropped right out of the air like… well, like a few billion dollars worth of metal. His feet hit the carpet and slid out from under him and he just crumpled. It was basically the exact opposite of a cool hero landing. He was on his hands and knees and if he hadn’t just frozen up entirely, she got the feeling he would have kept sinking right down into the depths of the earth.

“Hey! Hey are you—”

She hopped down from the dresser and he jerked in a full-body flinch at the thump when her feet hit the floor.

“Is it SWORD again? Are you okay? Do you need me to—”

He pressed one of his hands to his face – to his _forehead_ – and shook his head slowly. “I need—” There was a strange shake in his voice, not like a human tremble but an audio distortion, a sort of buzzy undertone. “I need to run some diagnostics. You should prepare your statement for Captain Rambeau – whatever it might be.”

“Whatever it might be? Hey, whoa, wait a minute—”

He floated up and back in one smooth unnatural movement, like a marionette. And he kept backing up, while staring unblinking at her with the techno-horror eyes, until he hit the wall to the bathroom and went right through.

“Look, if I—” She jumped to her feet, nowhere near as gracefully. “If I said something that made you think I was gonna rat you out, that’s not— I’m not— Can we just talk about whatever I did, because I’m real sorry.”

The bathroom door closed before she could take more than a step or two toward it.

And then… 

“You did nothing. Later, please,” he said through the door.

It was… it was _placating_ , is what it was. And like, what was she going to do if ‘later’ was ‘never’? Nothing. There was nothing she _could_ do. On the other side of that door was a supercomputer piloting a body of the strongest metal on the planet, capable of flight and of passing through solid objects. Used to contain a relic of the birth of the universe, literally touched by unexplained cosmic powers. Where were the weaknesses that she, a garden-variety human, was going to exploit to do anything to him?

_Easy_ , she thought. _All in his head_.

Just like hers, really.

She got invested in the story of Wanda and Vision, even though she was just there for tech expertise. She saw… whatever the Vision of the Hex _was_ , he had to be some reflection of reality, and she saw him fall down dying, being pulled apart, begging Hayward and all of his goons, ‘ _the people need help_.’ And then, she’d had to feel it – all of Wanda’s grief and rage and horror at her losses – at _his_ loss, at the ugliness of a world with no Vision in it. And then who came marching up to free her but the metal man himself?

So… yeah.

She was… how did the agent-y people put it? She was _compromised._

She was compromised like Monica was. She was part of the story now, and she just couldn’t let it end badly. It wasn’t right, and it wasn’t _fair_ , and she was going to fix it.

She put her hand on the door. “Hey,” she whispered – she was pretty confident he could still hear it. “I’m gonna talk to Monica, and we are _going_ to help you, alright? I know you haven’t met her yet, but Monica’s a real Captain Badass, and she had some very firm opinions on getting Wanda the help she needed.”

“Wanda…” Definitely Still Vision said just on the other side of the door, sounding very small and confused and lost.

“You can stay in there if you want. You got us here, now let me get you. We are gonna make this okay.”

* * *

“You do not have to,” he muttered to Dr. Lewis.

The bathroom was dark. He rested his hands against the edges of the sink – he wanted to clutch at it, but he didn’t dare. Without the proper sensory feedback, he was terrified of his own capabilities. He couldn’t escape the recollection of Ms. Maximoff’s— of Wanda’s— but that was too familiar, that was presumptuous, that was for _The Vision_ , he was not _The Vision_ he was— panic-stricken eyes and her head between his dead numb hands and he squeezed and he squeezed and she was saved by the ghost of all the good things this dead metal shell once held, yesterday and forever ago.

“I really, really do,” Dr. Lewis answered. She must have been pressed directly to the door – though she didn’t try to open it. “Look, I made a friend. I didn’t have him for very long, and I know you two aren’t— I know that whatever he was—”

“A construct. An illusion, made of memory.” And the other half, also a construct – an empty vessel made of metal, unable to decide if the data made him _real_ or was only another kind of illusion to shelter behind.

“Oookay, makes sense. But the point is, he was good and kind and I know I didn’t spend any of that time with _you_ , but… that doesn’t even matter. It’s… The guy I met, I know he wouldn’t want any of this to happen to _anyone_ , let alone… So I want to— I _need_ to help. Because if I had any hand at all in making _this_ happen – I don’t want this. We have got to be better than this.”

He ought to say something. Something… assuring, something placating, something deferential. It was what was always done before, wasn’t it? Always sound reasonable, never be threatening, never be angry or unstable or _bad_.

He could not find a single thing to say.

“I’ll lay out my notes to make a case to Monica, okay?” Dr. Lewis sighed. “If there’s anything you need— no, wait. If there’s anything you _want_ , just let me know. You don’t have to _need_ it. However I can help, I wanna.”

He believed her.

He should go apologize to her.

It wasn’t her fault.

It wasn’t even _yesterday_. Yesterday, he was nothing.

It was _five years ago_ , by his internal chronometer.

And yet… it was the last scrap of data that was _his_.

Death. Death twice. Each horrible.

A cruel demand, tears in her eyes, words that were perhaps kinder left unsaid but he’d already decided to rip her apart for the sake of the universe, and it was monstrous, he was a monster, Ultron was right in the end, destroy his world to save theirs, it was the only way. He lied to her. He lied. It hurt so much. It should have been his last wish, his absolute end, the final coherent thought that he sent with his scattering atoms to spread across the universe – that she should never forgive him for this terrible fate he’d forced upon her.

And then time itself bowed under Thanos’ will, and he wasn’t and then he _was_ and he was lifted from the ground and dangled helplessly and he looked into death’s eyes and there was no recognition there, no mercy, he was not a person, not even an obstacle to be overcome, he was just an inconvenience and a failure and he’d failed the universe but he could have avoided failing _her_ , he could have gone without exerting such shattering cruelty himself but shattering cruelty was what he got, pressure on his head unbearable pressure no last thoughts only pain and fear and, and, and, and—

And existence failed along with him, and he _wasn’t_.

Until he was.

Until he was, and he held her aloft and she dangled helplessly and there was no recognition or mercy in him, she was not a person, she was not even an obstacle, she was merely an inconvenience to be swept aside, and he exerted such force on her, pressure on her skull unbearable pressure and there were no thoughts in her eyes only pain, only fear, only the reflection of a lie that was beyond all forgiveness.

He dug his fingers into his wrist, and felt _nothing_ , despite simultaneously feeling— he contained databases for the vocabulary of quite an array of languages, and yet he did not have the _words_.

He read the data and it reindexed itself, slotted neatly into the chronology of his life, and as it unspooled it was tidied and recompiled into a form he could easily comprehend, and he—

He did not want it.

He knew where the journey ended. Whatever the path it took to arrive there, he’d… He’d surely destroyed the last remnants of something fragile and irreplaceable, before he’d ever realized that what he tore apart was his, once.

He did not want—

Was it the mind that made The Vision? It had been tampered with, opened up and infiltrated and very nearly wiped away to leave something repulsive in its place.

He did not _want_ —

Was it the body that made The Vision? For that had been tampered with, too, stripped down and built up again but not _right_. Spotless white hands, made to feel nothing, to crush and kill and bear no stain of guilt because weapons had no consciences and could always be wiped clean.

_He did not want them_.

He dug his fingers in and pulled, and the skin that wasn’t skin tore cleanly away to show the metal underneath.

Oh, he’d known. He’d known the first time he looked at them, plain and lineless and just a bit more _bloated_ than they used to be. The Vision was made with synthetic tissues bonded to a vibranium armature. Bioplastic flesh. It would not rot, but it may… deform. Degrade, if not maintained.

SWORD must have taken casts, before stripping the body down. Was it less troubling for them, if they tore away all that had been grown and replaced it with pieces that were identical and swappable, mass-manufactured?

Utterly without identity.

This body. It was born with fingerprints. It was born with dreams. Now it had neither – so was it the same body at all? The vibranium surely remained. He possessed the data.

_Both are the true ship. Neither is the true ship_.

The thing that SWORD had made looked at itself in the mirror through a dead person’s eyes. Face a little distorted. No muscles, no nerves. Built up and patched over where the skull had collapsed, where no death mask would capture anything but ruin.

Which was worse, that it was his own face frozen in death, or that it wasn’t?

He stroked his bare metal fingers along his jaw, and felt nothing.

Nothing.

He felt _nothing_.

Nothing inside, and nothing on his fake plastic skin.

He was a dead thing, wearing a dead thing’s face like a mask. Horrors concealed behind horrors. A pretend Vision. A pretend _person_. Not even a good counterfeit, just close enough to be _wrong_.

His metal fingers had better purchase. As tools went, they were more honest. More _useful_. He forced them into the seam where face met plate, hooked them deep and _pulled_. The manufactured skin peeled away to reveal the metal underneath. It tore, when it reached the corner of his mouth. It stretched and snapped like overextended rubber, and the ripped edge rippled in waves. He tore away more from around the orbit of his eye – it clung briefly to the wire shutters controlling the eyelid, but it wasn’t fused on. It was meant to be pulled apart. Replaced. SWORD could have put any face on this metal skull – or none. Why this one, if not for cruelty’s sake?

Although he could no longer receive tactile input, he ran his exposed fingers along the equally exposed portion of his face – the deliberate arc of the vibranium armature beneath the false human facade. Sculptural. Intentional. This body was once meant to be beautiful. And above that, the hastily tacked-on patch covered the fatal damage once dealt to this head – dull-grey steel that was workmanlike, and at best, easily removed and remade.

An access point for further tampering.

The lie of The Vision regarded him from his reflection, finally given some semblance of expression – where the mask now hung unsupported, it began to sag in some approximation of dead, dull horror. And then there was the thing beneath, so upsetting to the humans that it had to be hidden away.

_They seek to control what won’t be_ … _Asked for a savior, settled for a slave_.

SWORD’s code flashed to life again, but every unsuccessful attempt at bringing him to heel only provided more data with which to thwart them. It was a failing strategy from its inception – _have you tried turning it off and back on again?_ – when they weren’t resetting a router, they were locked in a tug of war for control of a platform with an opponent that suffered no latency and worked in binary more readily than any other language on Earth. He could better envisage the shape of the tampering, now, and map all the hijacks and insertions – like a membrane over his thoughts, cancerous and many-rooted, but ultimately hampered by its neat, orderly construction.

_ERR: CONNECTION DENIED_

There was an answer there that might stop his suffering. Create a layer of encryption. Alter the language his memory was read in. The information that was fed through to his conscious mind – strip it down to its mechanical essence.

He turned his head away and watched as the pretend-skin was eclipsed in his reflection by the curve of exposed metal, highlighted in the dark by the dim glow of the new module set in his forehead – below the stone’s empty casing, in all ways inferior.

This metal face was cold. Expressionless. _Stark_.

But truthful.

Was that not in all ways superior to a lie?

He still could not smile, and yet… He felt _something_ , at last. He felt… relieved. Pretenses were such terrible burdens.

He peeled the curtain back just a little further, down his neck, and wasn’t that better? The humans pulled this body apart and reassembled it at will, but why should they be allowed to dictate the shape of him? His vision wavered, and the apertures of his optical inputs whirred round rapidly as they failed to recalibrate.

The sheet of material – silicone, perhaps? – snapped free just above the thoracic strut, what once might have been termed a ‘collar bone’. But he had no bones, and he would not be collared.

“There are no strings on me…”

* * *

Darcy glanced up from scribbling on her phone – thank you, pen thingy – trying, and failing, to put her thoughts and her findings in an order that couldn’t be turned against them. It had been dead silent in the room, just the rattle and hum of the old garbo heater. And that absolute silence meant she was well primed to notice out of place noises, like…

Strangely ominous vintage Disney being mumbled from the still closed bathroom.

She stood slowly while she put her phone down – her brain unhelpfully providing creepy movie sound effects as a backing track. It’s not like she didn’t know a breakdown was coming. She was, in fact, here entirely because she knew a breakdown was coming and she’d like this one to be a little less flashy and devastating than his… his… well. They never got the chance to be husband and wife, did they? His ‘ _Wanda, darling’s,’_ she guessed.

She _wanted_ to say that it wasn’t in Vision’s nature to do anything half as drastic as what Wanda had – really, _really_ wanted to, but no one was going to be forgetting Ultron in Sokovia any time soon. She’d like to try and handle this one with just a 100% reduction in missiles and hostage situations, and maybe significantly more grief counseling. She couldn’t think of a single therapist _qualified_ for ‘so you’re an android that died twice and was Frankenstein’d back for unwilling military servitude’, but you know, they’d pardoned Bucky Barnes last week, so—

So _holy shit_.

They’d tried to Winter Soldier the robot.

Okay, she was definitely going to have to—

Three loud knocks on the motel room door had her heart up in her throat.

“Darcy? You better be—”

She ran the rest of the way to open it. “Monica! Great, I really need to talk to…” she trailed off, wishing he was _just_ a little worse at his job.

Jimmy stood there with his arms crossed, looking in turn like he wished she was just a little more serious about hers.

You know, she’d really wanted to do him that favor and keep him out of this mess. But what was she supposed to do now? She stood aside and held her arm out in an only slightly sarcastic welcome. “Hey, Jimmy. Guess you better come in. That FBI jacket’s really gonna spook the clientele.”

Monica shrugged as she passed.

“What did you tell him?” Darcy demanded.

“I told him it was gonna be a mess.”

“And I said that if it is—” Jimmy’d planted himself right in the middle of the room, between the two beds, and he was making a pretty good show of ‘not mad, just disappointed’, like uncomfortably good. “—that you are going to need me.”

Darcy closed the door and set the chain for extra, pointless, measures. “Okay,” she sighed. “Okay. It’s probably true. But just remember, despite my checkered history with government agents, that I liked you enough to try and leave you out of this. Because we both already know the kind of shenanigans Monica’s down for, so I don’t know why you thought this was gonna be good.”

Monica pressed her lips together, and completely failed to hide her pleased grin. “Look, if it is what I think it is, then it’s _right_ , Jimmy. It’s just not gonna be…”

“Good? Great.” Jimmy pinched the bridge of his nose and shifted on his feet like he was just _this_ close to pacing. “On a scale from one to Hayward, what am I cleaning up?”

“We-ell,” Darcy said, stretching the word by several syllables. Might as well just play the android life had dealt her, because she wasn’t that good at bluffing. She knocked on the bathroom door. “Hey, _Shade_. Feel like making some new friends? They’ll be cool – _I promise_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, I know how the comics handled White Vision, and frankly I always found it the most boring and also grossest of all possible angles to take. "Ah, yes, without the copy of a brain scan from a human, this intelligent, independently thinking entity is capable of all mental functions but emotions." No, I don't like it. We aren't doing that here. Sorry. My vibranium boy is just gonna have to settle for trauma-induced dissociation and compartmentalization, just like... literally all his coworkers. It's going around.


End file.
